It's free - it costs the user nothing to upgrade. I'm very interested to see two comments here saying that "free" must mean that it works on any x86 hardware they have lying around; why does that have to be a condition of being free?

There's a separate question here which is whether, given that OS/X only runs on Apple's hardware, the OS upgrades should have been zero cost all along. I have a vague memory that this was Sun's model back in the day - Solaris at one point only ran on their Sparc hardware, so they didn't bother much with licensing as you had to buy their hardware to use it, and that's where they made the money.

I wish Microsoft will follow suit with Windows and Office, like they already do in China (insert a sarcasm symbol here).Seriously, they could try to do that with Windows 8.2 or the next version name is gonna be.I will update immediately. Perhaps I won't be in the minority.

So GǪ I went to the Cadillac dealership for their new, improved fuel injection system. Put it on my car but it just wouldn't run. I went back and COMPLAINED GǪ "Hey why won't your new fuel injection system work on my 1996 Dodge? It IS a CAR!!

Stop calling this upgrade 'free'. It only works on specific Intel processors and quite a few features only work on Apple hardware. Yes, there is no charge, but free means you can take the OS and install it on any x86_64 hardware - no such thing. And after paying already exorbitant prices for 'Apple' hardware that costs a small fraction when bought off the shelf the least they can do is throw in an OS upgrade without charge.

There is not much money made for Apply by selling OS upgrades, but there is a huge savings in getting people off old versions.It is much cheaper for Apple to give updates away and cut support periods. Rather focusing on supporting various versions it may get reduced to the current one and the last one, nothing else.Apple in the business to make money and everything they do (as most other companies) is purely for maximizing profits. One way is asking insane prices - and Apple already does that - and the other way is cutting expenses. Of course, it also helps that naive and gullible journalists write that "Mavericks is free" although it is far from it!!

The thing is that Apple is a hardware vendor, so it doesn't need to rely on the upgrade cycle to make money in the way MS does. Thus, it may well be that it will save more money in tech support by offering free system upgrades than it will lose by giving them away.

But what Apple appears to be contemplating is definitely not free software as Richard Stallman would define it.

Hopefully they've improved on iWork. I paid for it three or four years ago when I replaced a Windows PC with a Macbook Pro, but I didn't find it to be very easy or intuitive. For example, the word processing app didn't default to 8.5 x 11 page format, and when you started typing up a document, the default font setting was impossibly small. You had to learn how to format a document and its properties before you be productive. I'm sure they fixed all that ages ago, but it was Apple's chance to get me off Word four years ago.

I had the same too-much-to-learn experience with Open Office. I'm sure in both cases I would have quickly picked up on the new norms had I stuck with it, but my company made it too easy to use the Office Suite on my work laptop and my wife, who is a teacher, was constantly having to deal with Office documents submitted by students. Personally and professionally it was a non-starter.

Free is quite a stretch because OS X 10.9 apparently only works on Apple hardware or as virtual machine on systems that must have an Intel processor. When I think free then I expect to take any x86_64 UEFI compatible system and at least install 10.9 on it. I can understand some peripheral hardware to not work due to lack of drivers, but at least the OS should boot.That said, as long as OS X is tied to Apple hardware there is really nothing free about it and charging for a dot release is just bad business. At least Apple got that straightened out.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.